Category Archives: Britain

I’ve always thought the BBC News was reasonably trustworthy. Very establishment-oriented, very quick to condemn disorder in any form, very slow to condemn the police or politicians (unless a readily identifiable bad apple can be found), basically rather right-wing, unthinkingly dismissive of the radical Left and rather too fond of displaying attacks from the Right as evidence that they have achieved ‘balance’. For all that, I’ve always thought they were basically reliable on matters of fact, not to mention on fundamental issues like the importance of not killing, not lying and taking the law seriously.

My confidence has been dented by some recent stories. I was disturbed by the BBC’s coverage of the ‘Trojan Horse’ affair, parts of which didn’t so much skirt the ‘anti-extremist’ rabbit-hole as jump straight down it: “where does multi-culturalism end and extremism begin?” we were asked one evening, by the newsreader himself. (So, about these darkies – can we trust them as far as we can throw them?) Parts of the Gaza coverage have also been appalling. But it was last night’s news that really shook me – the story on restricting out-of-work benefits to EU migrants, specifically.

So here’s the story from PM, broadcast at 17.00 on 29/7/2014.

The government is defending new measures to restrict out-of-work benefits such as Job Seeker’s Allowance to EU migrants, saying they’ll save half a billion pounds over the next five years. EU claimants will receive only three months of payments unless there’s a very clear prospect of them getting a job.

On the 6.00 News (18.00, 29/7/2014), Norman Smith covered the politics of the announcement, and when I say ‘politics’…

Today’s curbs on so-called benefit tourism follow a string of similar announcements aimed at ending what the Prime Minister calls the “magnetic pull” of the British benefits system – the hope that barring EU migrants from claiming support after three months will deter many from coming here in the first place. But the move is also designed to reassure voters that Mr Cameron is serious about tackling immigration. … UKIP meanwhile, who have made immigration central to their appeal, mocked today’s announcement, insisting that under Mr Cameron immigrants would continue (in their words) to flood into Britain … The European Commission have also stepped into the fray, dismissing ministers’ concerns over benefit tourism and announcing a review into the legality of the government’s benefit changes. All of which is most unlikely to trouble Mr Cameron – provided today’s announcement helps convince voters he’s at least trying to address their concerns over immigration.

First off, there is nothing principled or even rational here. Smith distinguishes between the actual effect of the policy and its presentational impact, but the only effect cited – Cameron’s ‘hope’ – is that fewer people from other parts of the EU end up coming to Britain. Why is that a good idea? We’re not told; we don’t need to be told. But as well as this hoped-for reduction in the numbers of people speaking English with a foreign accent (and wasn’t there something about saving half a billion pounds earlier on?), the policy is designed to ‘reassure voters’ that the government is ‘trying to address their concerns’. By the end of the piece this has become the main purpose of the announcement: it’s not that the government hates foreigners, you understand, it’s just that lots of people out there do hate foreigners and the government wants their votes. As for the European Commission, we know that our Prime Minister doesn’t listen to them! (On a side note, the relentless personalisation of this story is depressing in itself – when was David Cameron elected president?) Those Europeans – they can talk about how there’s no evidence, and how it might be against the law or something, but why should anyone care what they say? Bunch of foreigners!

So there’s xenophobia; cynical attempts to pander to xenophobia, for no other reason than that somebody else is doing it; the design of government policy around vote-chasing, irrespective of whether it’s needed or what effect it will have; contempt for international obligations; contempt for evidence; contempt for the rule of law. This is disgusting stuff; to hear the BBC passing it on as political normality is depressing and, frankly, alarming.

But all is not lost. The programme included a second report on the same policy by Mark Easton, who seems to have more traditional ideas about how journalism works:

When the BBC asked how many migrants would be affected by the proposed changes to eligibility, we were told ministers simply didn’t know. There are no figures for EU migrants claiming Job Seeker’s Allowance for more than three months. The government blames the previous Labour administration for not keeping proper records. Our analysis suggests the number affected by the new measures could be as low as a few thousand across the whole country. … [The Prime Minister] told reporters today’s changes would save the British taxpayer half a billion pounds over the next five years. However, later Downing Street explained he was referring to estimates for how much might be saved by existing immigration controls. As we now know, they can’t tell how much the policy might save, because they admit they don’t have the evidence that would tell them.

Wait a minute – that’s a story right there. The Prime Minister announced the reduction of entitlement to out-of-work benefits from six to three months, and then he said – it was quoted all over the place – “Our changes today will save the British taxpayer half a billion pounds over the next five years”. None of your ‘existing immigration controls’ – our changes today. That claim was false – or speculative at best – and it’s been retracted, after the BBC did the numbers and asked for clarification. That’s the headline, surely. At the very least it’s a proud day for BBC News: “Government withdraws misleading claims under pressure from BBC”. This could have legs: “Furious Cameron demands source of inaccurate immigration figures”; “Cameron under pressure as ‘misleading’ immigration claims unravel”; “Fears for coalition as Lib Dems challenge immigration policy” (they haven’t yet, but get this out there and they will)…

At the very least, the story has changed: it’s no longer a story about how your government is going to save money and address your fears about all those nasty immigrants (with a nod and a wink to the grown-ups from Norman Smith: OK, so it’s all just scaremongering, but that’s politics for you!) It’s now a story about how the government has put forward a very controversial and possibly illegal policy, with the specific aim of making one group of very poor people even poorer, and first claimed to have evidence to support it, then admitted that there is no evidence.

News headlines, Radio 4, 19.00, 29/7/2014

The government is defending new measures to restrict out-of-work benefits such as Job Seeker’s Allowance to EU migrants, saying they’ll save half a billion pounds over the next five years.

Unless they use pre-recorded news headline segments, by the time that script was read out, the government wasn’t ‘saying’ that. The announcer himself had probably heard the retraction on the 6.00 News. The only reason for leaving that claim unchallenged is to save the government’s face – and that’s the last thing the BBC News should be doing, least of all when the loss of face is related to a baseless, evidenceless, cynical, hateful and illegal exercise in chasing votes and polluting the public discourse.

BBC News: shame on you.

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I’ve written a paper on anti-social behaviour and, in particular, the ‘Community Trigger’. It’s based entirely on published sources, so the conclusion is basically that somebody ought to do some proper research on this – I’m hoping to get some funding to do just that. In the mean time here’s the abstract and the references, in case anyone’s interested in the kind of stuff I’m doing at the moment (at least, the more policy-ish end of it; more skirmishes in the region of legal theory to come).

Noisy students, pro-life protesters and street football: How the Community Trigger has refined our understanding of anti-social behaviour

Abstract

This paper reviews the experience of the Community Trigger pilot schemes carried out in England in 2012 and 2013. The Community Trigger, now enacted in law, is a mechanism whereby people affected by anti-social behaviour (ASB) can request a review of their case, which has to be undertaken if repeated complaints have been made with an unsatisfactory response. The experience of the Community Trigger pilots offers a testing ground for different conceptions of ASB – considered variously as ‘neighbourhood disorder’, as ‘incivilities’ and as the actions of an ‘anti‑social minority’ – and for approaches to addressing ASB, based on different understandings of where authentic knowledge of ASB resides (with legislators, with local specialists or with the individuals affected). The pilots demonstrate wide variation among the areas involved, suggesting that different approaches to ASB and its management are likely to persist. Given the inherent variability of ASB – considered as ‘context-dependent’ disorder – the persistence of local and regional variation is likely to pose challenges for measurement of ASB and of the success of any centrally-driven initiatives to address it.

Andrew O’Hagan’s been thinking – and talking to people – about the Savile scandal and the larger cultural conditions it grew from. His piece is a bit overlong and, I think, under-edited, but it’s genuinely insightful and troubling for all that. I shall be thinking about this for a while:

The public made Jimmy Savile. It loved him. It knighted him. The Prince of Wales accorded him special rights and the authorities at Broadmoor gave him his own set of keys. A whole entertainment structure was built to house him and make him feel secure. That’s no one’s fault: entertainment, like literature, thrives on weirdos, and Savile entered a culture made not only to tolerate his oddness but to find it refreshing.

And, in particular, this:

Let’s blame him for all the things he obviously was, and blame him for a host of other things we don’t understand, such as how we love freaks and how we select and protect people who are ‘eccentric’ in order to feed our need for disorder. We’ll blame him for that too and say we never knew there would be any victims, when, in fact, we depend on there being victims. Savile just wouldn’t have been worth so much to us without his capacity to hurt.

I don’t know quite what that last sentence means and I’m not sure O’Hagan does either, but I’ve got a horrible feeling it’s true.

A week after writing the above, I saw this from Anthony Barnett which I think joins some of the dots. Barnett starts by musing on the sheer repellence of Savile – the obvious, in-your-face excessiveness of his get-up and demeanour –

Why did ‘we the public’ admire a blatantly bad man? You only needed to look twice at his clothes, his glasses, his conjuror’s apparatus of decoys and diversions, his bling and his shell-suits and cultivated white-blond hair to sense he was repellent. Imagine getting onto a bus filled with Jims grinning with his arrogance and self-aggrandisement.

I’ll come on to “we the public” in a minute – that assumed ‘we’ is one of the weak points of O’Hagan’s piece as well – but I do think this is a real question. Why did people not only tolerate but celebrate such an insistent display of preening arrogance? Did nobody ever ring up and say “About that PA, Jim – maybe something low-key this time, not so much of the gold and leave the cigars at home”? It doesn’t seem very likely – the peacocking was part of what people wanted. Why? Barnett suggests an interesting answer and makes a couple of interesting parallels:

It was thanks to a form of celebrity that shares and rejoices in the whiff of wickedness that surrounds misogyny. The cult (and love) of chauvinist celebrity forgives misdemeanours ahead of time. It encourages men especially to project longings to be outside the law onto the figure of fame. The media may provide the cult’s priests, but the congregation is compliant and provides the energy. Today celebrities seem to build entire reputations on ‘getting away with it’ as ‘we the public’ continue to collude in a worship of strong and powerful men who break the rules.

Bingo – Jimmy Savile’s appeal wasn’t acting like an infantile megalomaniac, it was acting like an infantile megalomaniac and getting away with it. People around him knew that the treatment he was getting was against the rules; they also knew nobody would ever bend the rules for them in the same way, and deep down they wished somebody would. So if he could get away with it, well, good luck to him.

There’s something quite deep-rooted and weird going on here. Jerry Sadowitz’s 1987 crack about Savile – “That’s why he does all the fucking charity work: it’s to gain public sympathy for when his fucking case comes up.” - hints at it but (perhaps surprisingly) doesn’t go far enough. Consider what we knew about Savile before he died:

What he was like: flashy, excessive, arrogant, with a one-note act centring on drawing attention to himself

What he did: charged large amounts of money for appearing and doing the act

How he did it: his own way, for his own price (I don’t get out of bed for less than £10,000) and whatever side-benefits he felt like

What he did it for: charity, in particular children’s charities

He demanded attention, to himself as himself – look at me being me, doing the me thing that I do! He was loved and cared for and had to do nothing in return apart from being him, doing the being-him act. He did it however he wanted to, and everyone else had to fit in around him. And he did it for unarguable good causes – not only good causes, but perhaps the one type of good cause that everybody, however hard-headed or mean-spirited, can sign up to. (Famine in Africa? Charity begins at home, I say. Cancer research? Can’t fight Fate, we’ve all got to go some time. Terminally-ill children? Ahhh…) To be loved unconditionally while being an all-powerful egomaniac, and at the same time to be undeniably good – it’s genuinely infantile thinking; it’s how we all think of ourselves, or would like to think of ourselves, between about 18 months and 3 years. Never quite goes away, either – so when we see somebody dedicated to living that particular dream, there is a definite urge to bend the rules of the adult world so that they can get away with it. In its own terms it’s a virtuous circle – the star lives out the fantasy, so we bend the rules for them, so they get away with it, so we bend the rules some more… It’s only when the music stops that we find out what they’ve been getting away with – hence Elvis’s squirrel sandwiches NB check this or Imelda Marcos’s shoes. Or Savile’s victims. Needless to say, there can be an excessive, spectacular edge to the exposure phase as well, as if to keep the roundabout spinning just a bit longer – look what else he’s been getting away with! Which may tell us something about the Duncroft story.

We project our own thwarted megalomania onto stars, I’m suggesting, and part of the process is wanting them to break the rules and get away with it – and indulging them when they do. (You can tell a lot about how loyal a following somebody has from their reaction to brushes with the law. Compare and contrast: Pete Doherty and heroin, George Michael and cannabis, Richard Madeley and Tesco.) There are two worrying aspects to this. One is directly relevant to Savile, and relates to just what people get away with when they can get away with it. The good news is that most people, given the power to please themselves, don’t gravitate to cruelty and abuse – the dressing rooms of the stars aren’t one long Stanford Prison Experiment. But there’s always that possibility, particularly in a culture which positively validates male power over women. The 70s are a long time ago – they seem like a different planet – but that culture and that possibility haven’t entirely gone away.

The other issue, which is perhaps more immediate, concerns what happens when celebrity culture seeps into politics – which is where Barnett’s parallels come in. He points to an extraordinary piece in the Daily Mail, in which Max Hastings settles some old scores. Either that or he really hates his subject:

Most politicians are ambitious and ruthless, but Boris is a gold medal egomaniac. I would not trust him with my wife nor — from painful experience — with my wallet. It is unnecessary to take any moral view about his almost crazed infidelities, but it is hard to believe that any man so conspicuously incapable of controlling his own libido is fit to be trusted with controlling the country.

His chaotic public persona is not an act — he is, indeed, manically disorganised about everything except his own image management. He is also a far more ruthless, and frankly nastier, figure than the public appreciates.
…
Some Tory MPs are so panicked by their standing in the opinion polls that they have persuaded themselves that London’s mayor is the future. On the basis of what, some of us would ask. Boris Bikes on London’s streets? The peerless jokes and bonhomie and TV wizardry? Testimonials from ex-lovers who found him amusing in bed?

Ouch. But then, what’s behind his (clearly quite substantial) popular appeal, if all there is to the man is ruthless egomania and a few good jokes?

A friend said to me not long ago: ‘When will you understand that the reason the young are potty about Boris is precisely because he is not serious, because he treats the whole business of politics as a bit of a lark.’ This is true. I sat at a dinner table last week with three teenagers who expressed near-hero worship for the mayor, and said they could not care less when I suggested that he has less integrity than a City banker.
…
Boris Johnson was at the Tory conference yesterday for one purpose only — the exaltation of himself. This does not much matter when he is only Mayor of London, but would make him a wretched prime minister. He is not a man to believe in, to trust or respect save as a superlative exhibitionist. He is bereft of judgment, loyalty and discretion.

Answer: what’s behind it is… ruthless egomania and a few good jokes. Before Johnson was elected, Caitlin Moran semi-seriously advised voting against him because of the jokes – because, as she knows (and I know) making jokes to order is hard, time-consuming, attention-stealing work, and the time and energy he’d spent dreaming up “Ping-pong’s coming home” could have been much better spent on, well, politics. She missed what now seems obvious – that the jokes are actually a demonstration of how little of his attention Johnson devotes to politics, and that this is part of his appeal. He gets away with it – and a key emblem of getting away with it, in a society where men dream of power over women, is an element of unpunished sexual dominance and deceit. A Boris who didn’t cheat on his wife wouldn’t be Boris.

There’s another obvious political parallel, which Barnett mentions briefly in his conclusion:

the kind of racy ‘reality’ [Savile] personified was an early product of a twisted version of male celebrity culture whose misogyny continues to be celebrated and is seeping into politics.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that this isn’t Italy. There is also growing resistance to such behaviour in large parts of the public perhaps even more than within the elite. We are spitting out the presumptions and arrogance behind Savile and company.

Another political leader who acts like a celebrity; another leader with a ruthless devotion to his own advancement and little or no interest in the substance of politics; another political leader who spends his time making jokes, and let’s not even go into the sexual side of the story. It’s an unpleasant parallel, and I’m less sanguine about what it tells us than Barnett appears to be. If “this isn’t Italy” because of OpenDemocracy and the Guardian, Italy isn’t Italy either: there was ‘growing resistance’ to Berlusconi when he first came to power – in 1994 – and it’s been growing ever since. The trouble is, for every voter who’s genuinely appalled at the tax-dodging, the bunga bunga, the demonisation of the Left and the awful jokes, there’s another who thinks it’s all a bit of a laugh and Silvio’s a sly dog for getting away with it. And, in a democracy, you don’t need to get all the voters on your side; realistically, you don’t even need half. Barnett’s overestimation of the British public reminds me of Leonardo Sciascia’s comments on the Italian Communist Party’s attempts, in the 1970s, to evoke a ‘sense of the State’ in the ruling Christian Democratic party.

Neither [Aldo] Moro nor the party he presided over had ever had a ‘sense of the State’. The idea of the State … had probably only crossed Aldo Moro’s mind in his youth [i.e. under Fascism] … what has attracted and continues to attract at least a third of the Italian electorate to the party of Christian Democracy is precisely the absence in that party – an attractive and reassuring absence – of an idea of the State

Berlusconi offered an “attractive and reassuring absence” on a much larger scale – an absence of morality and seriousness, as well as ethics and political substance – but the approach is basically the same. Ego and cynicism, worn blatantly enough, can take you a very long way; it’s part of the deal we make with the godlike figures onto whom we project our powerlessness and compliance.

So there’s a ‘we’ watching the screens and harbouring dreams of power without responsibility – and there’s a ‘we’ who are “spitting out the presumptions and arrogance” and generally not taking it any more. I think they both exist, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t back the second against the first in a fight. O’Hagan evokes another ‘we’, silent and complicit:

And no one said, not out loud: ‘What’s wrong with that man? Why is he going on like that? What is he up to?’ He was an entertainer and that’s thought to be special. A more honest society brings its victims to the Colosseum and cheers. We agreed to find it OK when our most famous comedians were clearly not OK.

1997Val McDermid publishes The Wire In The Blood, featuring the character of “Jacko Vance”, a rapist and murderer.

Vance, a former athlete, hung about hospitals and toured towns in a show called Vance’s Visits – similar to the Savile’s Travels radio show.

Val, 57, said: “People often asked me where I had got the inspiration for the character. They never guessed it was Savile. For a start, Jacko is handsome and charming. I assume Savile didn’t recognise himself in that description.”

Val, from Fife, encountered Savile as a young reporter in 1977. She said: “He was a deeply unpleasant man. He was all smiles and laughter for the audience but as soon as we were alone, he was different. Savile was very much in the front of my mind when I was creating Jacko.”

1996
Irvine Welsh publishes Ecstasy, featuring the character of Freddy Royle, a necrophiliac.

Ecstasy is a collection of three short narratives; in the first, “Lorraine Goes to Livingston”, Freddy Royle was a chat-show host and “distinguished friend” at St Hubbin’s Hospital.

In one passage, Welsh writes: “The thing was, Freddy brought millions of pounds into the place with his fund-raising activities. This brought kudos to the trustees, and made St Hubbin’s Hospital a flagship for the arm’s-length trusts from the NHS. All they had to do was keep schtumm and indulge Sir Freddy with the odd body.”

Jimmy Savile drops dead at the Stoke Mandeville Boxing Day bash – but the patients are far from mourning.

[Male voice]: “The majority, if not all of them, are extremely relieved that he’s now dead, although I suspect that some of them will be sorry that he didn’t suffer a great deal more.”

1990
Lynn Barber interviews Jimmy Savile: I was nervous when I told him: “What people say is that you like little girls.” Savile replies by denying that under-age girls are interested in him:
“A lot of disc jockeys make the mistake of thinking that they’re sex symbols and then they get a rude awakening. But I always realised that I was a service industry. Like, because I knew Cliff [Richard] before he’d even made a record, all the Cliff fans would bust a gut to meet me, so that I could tell them stories about their idol. But if I’d said, ‘Come round, so that I can tell you stories about me’ or ‘Come round, so that you can fall into my arms’ they’d have said: ‘What! On yer bike!’ But because reporters don’t understand the nuances of all that, they say, ‘A-ha’.”

Is that no one saying anything, or just no one saying anything “out loud”? And if it’s the latter, what would have constituted saying something out loud – publishing and being damned? Let’s face it, Savile wouldn’t just have seen you in court, he’d have seen you in the bankruptcy court.

I think what’s going on here is that a sense of collective complicity is being stretched to the point where it becomes perversely comforting. If we are all to blame, then we can do something about it; at the very least we can do better next time, and try to stop there being a next time. It’s a reassuring thought: never again! ¡no pasarán!

But what if part of the problem is that there is no “we”? What if some of us were spitting out the presumptions and the arrogance all along – or at least having very bad feelings about them – but our revulsion could only be articulated in undertones and behind closed doors? We might not immediately think of Savile as a powerful man – he didn’t make anything happen on a national scale, or on any but a very local scale – but when it came to his own affairs he was very powerful indeed, in several different ways. As well as being rich, famous and well-connected, he was charismatic, generally well-liked, personally forceful and – in his prime – physically strong; he wasn’t a good man to say No to. Once someone has acquired that kind of power, it doesn’t really matter what “we” think about him (and it usually is “him”); whether we view what he does with indulgent approval or with physical revulsion, he’s still going to get away with it. The “we” of O’Hagan’s diffuse culture of star-worshipping quasi-paedophilia is doing double duty, standing in for the “we” who are able to hold individually powerful people to account. And that “we” – that collective articulation of a popular sense of what’s right and what’s wrong – didn’t exist in the 1960s and doesn’t exist now; tabloid bouts of morality can perhaps be understood as a morbid symptom of its absence, fuelled by bad conscience (I never wanted him to get away with that!).

O’Hagan writes:

Child abuse is now a national obsession, but in 1963 it scarcely came up as a subject of public concern. That doesn’t mean it was fine back then and we were all better off, but it allows one to see how much the public understanding of what isn’t all right, or more or less all right, has changed. There have always been genuine causes for concern, but overall, nowadays there is an unmistakeable lack of proportion in the way we talk about the threat posed to children by adults. (It’s hard not to imagine that the situation has to do with a general estrangement from the notion of a reliable community.)

I think the first part of this is right, and for a much broader timespan than 1963 (which seems to have got into the argument here by way of the Larkin poem). The last, parenthetical comment is pointing to something important too. There are stars, there are individual purchasers or fans, and in between – what? What’s missing seems to be some kind of sense of society as a mechanism – or many different mechanisms – of feedback and accountability. O’Hagan comes close to arguing that Savile and people like him were acting in all our names. Perhaps it’s closer to the truth to say that some of us thought it was all a bit of a laugh – not so much “in my name” as “in my dreams”. As for the rest of us, we might have thought “not in my name”, but we had no way of saying it as a collectivity – and still, perhaps, don’t.

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After the party’s over, my friend,
There’ll be nothing you can put your finger on
Just a parasol…

One’s a member of government, one’s a member of the opposition. To be more precise, one’s an independent-minded but powerless member of the government coalition; one’s a leading member of the parliamentary opposition, with nothing to lose by attacking as forcefully as possible. Also, one’s 30 years older than the other. See if you can tell which is which from these quotations:

“I am not against a private element in the NHS, which may bring innovatory ideas and good practice, provided it is within the framework of a public service … But why have they tried to get away from the NHS as a public service, among the most efficient, least expensive and fairest anywhere in the world? Why have they been bewitched by a flawed US system that is unable to provide a universal service and is very expensive indeed? The remarkable vision of the 1945 Attlee government, of a public service free at the point of need for all the people of England, should not be allowed to die.”

“As David Cameron’s government railroads the health bill through parliament, MPs are being denied their constitutional role to properly scrutinise his plans for the NHS. The prime minister has already done a political fix with Nick Clegg on the health bill, and now he’s trying to force it through with a procedural fix.”

You’ll note that the second politician says nothing about the substance of what’s being done, why it’s wrong, why it’s not even cost-effective in its own terms, how it betrays one of the greatest reforms of the last century, or for that matter what it is. Instead, this person focuses entirely on procedure and personality, reducing issues of huge importance and interest to playground gossip about rule-breaking and who said what to whom. Apart from anything else, whether or not the revised health bill is being forced through with a “procedural fix” really doesn’t matter, in the scheme of things – if it weren’t being “forced through”, would that make it OK?

Comedy break:

As for who’s who, the first quote came from the semi-detached member of government (Shirley Williams, 81); the second from John Healey (51), who is currently Shadow Health Secretary. Healey was at Cambridge from 1979 to 1982 (as I was myself); he was elected to Parliament 15 years later, having spent the entire intervening period as a political hack (starting with a role as “deputy editor of the internal magazine of the Palace of Westminster, The House Magazine for a year in 1983″). It’s depressing that Baroness Williams sounds so much more left-wing than Healey – what with him being in the Labour Party and so on – but what’s really striking is how much more political she sounds, in the good sense of the word: the sense of talking about how the country is run, in the knowledge that this is a huge and endlessly important subject, and with the awareness that the conversation itself is serious and has been going on for decades. Healey could be talking about backstairs intrigue at Borchester Land.

But perhaps that shouldn’t be too surprising. It was 1997 when Healey was first elected: his entire parliamentary career has been in New Labour. And New Labour has emphatically not been about principle or history or serious discussion of how the country is run, if only because all of those things were a bit, well, Old Labour. What Blair brought to Labour, as I wrote a while back, wasn’t mere opportunism or lack of principle but something more motivated and more destructive:

it’s more like a commitment to abandoning the party’s principles, repeatedly and demonstratively, so as to disorientate and marginalise the opposition, so as to make it impossible for the party not to be in power. The trouble is, this can’t possibly be a long-term strategy. Political principles aren’t a renewable resource; abandon them once and they’re gone.

And when they’ve all gone, what have you got?

To focus on the issues myself, you can read more about the Tories’ plans to privatise the NHS here. Thanks, Spinwatch.

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The true intentions of certain groups of young people, who had arrived at Parco Lambro with their ski-masks in their rucksacks alongside their spanners and bottles of petrol, became clear yesterday afternoon … there was the sense of an organised manoeuvre, in the true sense of the word, and police intervention became inevitable: stones were thrown from one side, tear-gas grenades from the other
– l’Unità, 29th June 1976

Last night was an extreme situation. We haven’t dealt with such co-ordinated looting before. People set out to steal. This is a type of organised crime we’ve never seen before. This was organised: I was out last night and people were asking for directions to our town centre in order to attack it. … Businesses are angry, but people are calm. They understand this wasn’t social unrest, it was something different.
– Stella Creasy MP, 8th August 2011

I understand what has led many young people to break shop windows, but I don’t consider it to be the next step in the Italian revolution.
– Rossana Rossanda, 1977

2. Three tweets about looting

@jamesrbuk James Ball
Hard to see anything overly political in the looting of an electrical store (Curry’s) on other side of town (>10miles) to #Tottenham

@kpunk99 Mark Fisher
The right wing line on #tottenham makes no sense: if it’s all down to ‘criminals’, why the sudden upsurge in ‘criminality’ last night?

@sunny_hundal sunny hundal
Seems to me, what encourages looting isn’t poverty but the expectation you can get away with it. Same applies to the banks

3. Why Cynthia Jarrett is less relevant than the MartiansThis is a peculiarly unsatisfactory piece: Jonathan Jones observes that images of the Tottenham riot and its aftermath make him feel weird (they are “uncanny and reminiscent of late Victorian science fiction”), then suggests that evoking apocalyptic imagery might be “a corrective to the mis-application of history”, i.e. the temptation to draw parallels with the rioting of the early 80s. But why shouldn’t we draw parallels with the 80s – why would that be a mis-application of history? Jones’s answer, in total, is: the rioters themselves are too young to remember the 80s; Marx warned against misapplying historical parallels in the 18th Brumaire; and…

It is worth looking at images of London’s violent weekend and asking how they make you feel. Far from fitting into any historical model, they seem to me to come from an imagined London, a horror scenario of the city as a blazing wilderness

…in other words, images of the Tottenham riot and its aftermath make him feel weird. What Jones is resisting here becomes a bit clearer in an afterword:

Walking out in my neighbourhood after writing this, I found that Gay’s the Word bookshop on Marchmont Street, one of central London’s best-known gay landmarks, had its window smashed last night. A substance seems to have been thrown at the window before it was broken. This was the only business attacked on the street. So much for any attempt to see radicalism (at least of a cuddly leftwing variety) in these events.

I’ve got to say, I’m gutted to hear that Gay’s the Word has been attacked & hope they get back to normal before too long. (That said, I’m not aware of any trouble in Bloomsbury on Sunday night – this could just be a nasty coincidence.) But there’s a more important point, which is that – as far as I can tell – nobody anywhere is reading a “cuddly leftwing radicalism” into the riots; certainly nobody is saying that looting Curry’s in Brixton was a political gesture. The “Robin Hood” interpretation of the rioting is a strawman, just as much as it was when Rossanda dismissed it in 1977: Jones (and James Ball) can trample it all they like, but it won’t dispose of the real question posed by the riots.

4. Where are we going, and why are we all in this handcart?
What people are saying (self included) is that politics doesn’t stop when crime starts. There are reasons why people steal and smash windows; more importantly, there are reasons why most people don’t steal and smash windows, most of the time. (Sunny was more or less on the right track here – but I don’t think the calculation that you wouldn’t get away with it is the only reason why people tend to obey the law, or the most important one.) One or two people whose behaviour isn’t governed by our usual reasons to obey the law is a problem for the police, the social services and politicians, in that order. The problem becomes political first and foremost when lots of people start acting differently – when all those reasons suddenly stop working in a particular place and time. And then, as Mark says, the question why can’t be avoided. More to the point, the question why is an interesting question – and it’s one that politics is much better equipped to answer than evocations of Wells or fantasies of manoeuvres organised by lurking criminal networks, vast and cool and unsympathetic.

What do I think it’s all about? A couple of quotes, lifted from comments on Guardian posts:

Even if the rioting is just an opportunity to lob stuff at the police and loot local mobile phone and shoe shops (as it appears to be in Enfield) it’s obvious something has been brewing for a while. It may be disorganised and opportunistic but still speaks of a disatisfaction with things as they are.

There’s a widespread myth that law and order is preserved by police, politicians and other forces of authority. Not true. Never has been. If we all decide to go out and chuck a dustbin through Argos’s window and help ourselves, it would take about 15 million coppers to contain it. We actually have about 150,000.

Law and order is kept by a collective acceptance of mutual goals. If, as a society, we look after each other, offer everyone a share and a stake in the common weal, maintain some semblance of a Rousseauian Social Contract, then the vast majority of people will mostly stick to the rules without ever needing to see a police officer. When people lose that sense of being looked after, no longer feel part of society, no longer feel like they have any kind of share in any kind of collective, the ties that bind begin to be broken.

Rioting, especially the type of vandalism and looting we’ve seen in London, is a sure sign that the social contract is unravelling around the edges. In the days and weeks and months to come, we shall see how far it has frayed.

A Socialist Worker friend of mine once explained to me in some detail how every Prime Minister since Attlee had been to the Right of the one before; I’m not sure how he got over Macmillan/Wilson, but he made quite a good case for Heath/Wilson. (This was before Thatcher/Major). I wouldn’t go that far, but it does seem pretty clear that certain trends that were set in motion during Thatcher’s first term have never really been reversed. Over the last 30 years, work at every level has been steadily proletarianised: employment is nothing but a contract providing money in return for a working day, and a contract that is ever easier for the employer to revoke. Business values permeate all areas of society. The overriding goal, at all times, is to turn a profit: anything that contributes to that goal is good, anything that doesn’t is dispensable at best. The service ethic – the idea of taking pride in a job well done, at whatever level; the idea that the job you do is a way of contributing to a society where ‘we look after each other’ – is little more than a nostalgic fantasy. The institutions that used to nurture it, and whose daily workings made it into a lived reality, have been asset-stripped and hollowed out by ideologues with MBAs. Social life has been radically privatised, and deinstitutionalised in the process – party membership, union membership, local authority employment have dwindled away, without anything taking their place. One of the things that gets eroded in the process is deference to authority – because who are these authority figures anyway? Just ordinary people, just interchangeable employees doing an interchangeable job – even if the job involves chasing people with sticks. (And then they start talking about a Big Society!)

What’s it like to grow up in this world – a world where your only consistent role is to ‘consume’, because nobody, at any level, has any interest in you as a worker? What’s it like to be told that you’ve got to take whatever job you can get, on whatever pay you’re offered, and not to depend on the job still being there for you next year or next week? What’s it like to be told that you’ve got to prove you’re actively looking for work before you can sign on as unemployed – or that you’ve got to prove that you’re incapable of work before you can claim disability benefit – and you’ve got to prove these things to someone who won’t get paid if they believe you? And what’s it like to have grown up in a world like this, and then to be told by a government of unprepossessing Old Etonians that you’ve had it far too easy up to now? And then, what’s it like to read that those same politicians, and the people who write the papers you buy, and the police who keep everything under control, are all involved in a network of corruption and deceit?

What we’ve got at the moment isn’t a protest movement, or even a wave of riots; if anything, it’s a particularly long and broad wave of looting. And looting isn’t a political act – but it sends a definite political message. It says, I’m not going to wait any longer; I’m not going to wait for next month or next year when I could have what I want now. It says, I’m not going to play by the rules of your system; I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but right now I’m having it. It says, I’m not going to live in your world any longer; I don’t know where I’m going to be next week, but right now I’m just going to do what I want.

while people may have come together to riot and loot, they are likely to be doing so for different reasons. Some may be angry that they have no job. Some may be keen to have a free mobile handset. Still more may be there because they fear their friends would call them a “pussy” if they did not attend. Others may be there because they want to be able to talk about it with their mates in the days and weeks to come. For most indeed the reasons will not be fixed, and may change during the evening. I am sure some will have gone down for a look, and found the temptation of a broken-into off-licence a little too great.

We can, ultimately, establish no single motivation, and it is useless to try. It just makes you sound like Theresa May. What we can say, though, is something about comparative incentives.

Most people from richer areas, who have jobs or who have a good chance of getting a good job, will not riot in the next day or few because their retaining their job or job chance through not getting a criminal record is greater than any of the other incentives I have listed above. … People from poorer, more deprived areas and backgrounds are rioting for different, shifting motivations, but they are doing so because they do not have enough invested in what the state can offer them to outweigh the benefits of that rioting. That is, the state has temporarily failed, because a significant group of people in London have decided it is just not worth living within its jurisdiction.

People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all.

To end on the ghost of a positive note, that sense of collective power – that if you get a few people together, suddenly the rules don’t have to apply any more – is at the heart of a lot of radical mobilisation, although intellectual honesty compels me to note that it’s also at the heart of counter-revolutionary mobilisations and pogroms. Either way, a lot of the kids who were out last night are going to remember that feeling – is it ridiculously optimistic to hope that some of them will draw the right lesson (“don’t forget, we can also build”)? But that’s some way off. For now, I’m afraid things are going to get worse before they get better – I don’t see why the looting shouldn’t kick off again tonight (or any other night, for that matter), and the crackdown when it comes is going to be no fun at all.

Of 360 posts to be cut, 120 are from Future Media & Technology, up to 90 from BBC Vision, up to 39 from Audio & Music, 17 from Children’s, 24 from Sport and 70 in journalism from national news and non-news posts on regional news sites.

Outlining its plans today, the BBC said it will meet with commercial rivals twice a year to clarify its online plans, increase links to external sites to generate 22m referrals within three years and will halve the number of top level domains it operates.

The corporation also outlined five editorial priorities for BBC Online and clarified its remit. The BBC aims to meet all these objectives, and make 360 posts redundant, by 2013. The restructured BBC Online department will consist of 10 products including News, iPlayer, CBeebies and Search. Editorial will be refined, with fewer News blogs, and local sites will be stripped of non-news content. Blast, Switch and h2g2 are among the sites to be ditched. Other closures will include the standalone websites for the BBC Radio 5 Live 606 phone-in show and 1Xtra, 5 Live Sports Extra, 6 Music and Radio 7 digital stations.

In all, the BBC is pledging to close half of its 400 top level domains – with 180 to be gone ahead of schedule later this year.

(That’s top level directories, people – the word that goes after “bbc.co.uk/”. The top level domain is “.uk”.)

The BBC’s Web presence is vast, sprawling and a bit anarchic – a quality it has in the past shared with the groups of people responsible for it. (Back in 2002 I made a concerted effort to get some writing work from the technology bit of BBC Online, a task made more difficult by the impossibility of finding any personal contact information on the site. Sustained and ingenious googling eventually rewarded me with a name and a phone number(!). I rang it and spoke to the right person, only to be told that he’d moved to BBC History and was about to move on again. On the other hand, before he left he did commission me to write an 12,000-word timeline of English history from the Romans to Victoria, so it wasn’t as if no good came of it.) There is an awful lot of good stuff there, much of it user-generated, and lots of little online communities that have grown up to support it. And yes, the bits that the corporation pay for are ultimately paid for out of the licence fee, meaning that they don’t have to make money and hence have an advantage over commercial rivals which do. This is a good thing: there are lots of worthwhile things that can be done very easily with a small subsidy, but can only be done with great difficulty, if at all, on a profit-making basis. There is no earthly reason why a corporation which doesn’t have to make money – and can afford to chuck a few grand around here or there – should behave as if it did and couldn’t. No reason, apart from political reasons. So now BBC Online are going to have a “clarified remit”, and they’re going to show their plans to commercial rivals (!) twice a year (!!), and 360 creative people are going to walk.

What really gives this announcement the smell of wanton vandalism – wilful and ignorant destruction – is the part about all the sites that are going to close. Not the fact that they keep getting the terminology wrong – that’s a minor niggle – but the fact that all these sites aren’t going to be kept up as static pages; they’re not even going to be archived. Like all those old Doctor Whos and Not Only… But Alsos, they’re just going to disappear. (All except H2G2, which is going to be sold – news which leaves me feeling relieved but slightly baffled.) Two cheers for the Graun, which put up the whole list but couldn’t resist playing it for laughs – “Ooh look, there’s a site for Bonekickers – that was rubbish, wasn’t it? Let’s see, have they got Howard’s Way?” There isn’t a Howard’s Way site. There is, however, Voices, Nation on Film, the inexhaustible Cult and a curious online mind-mapping thing called Pinball. Check them out while you can. And do take a look at WW2 People’s War, a truly extraordinary work of amateur oral history, which contains… well, here it is in its own words:

The BBC’s WW2 People’s War project ran from June 2003 to January 2006. The aim of the project was to collect the memories of people who had lived and fought during World War Two on a website; these would form the basis of a digital archive which would provide a learning resource for future generations.

The target audience, people who could remember the war, was at least 60 years old. Anyone who had served in the armed forces during the war was, at the start of the project, at least 75. Most of them had no experience of the internet. Yet over the course of the project, over 47,000 stories and 14,000 images were gathered. A national story gathering campaign was launched, where ‘associate centres’ such as libraries, museums and learning centres, ran events to helped gather stories. Many hundereds of volunteers, many attached to local BBC radio stations, assisted in this.

The resulting archive houses all of these memories. These stories don’t give a precise overview of the war, or an accurate list of dates and events; they are a record of how a generation remembered the war, 60 years of more after the events, and remain in the Archive as they were contributed. The Archive is not a historical record of events, a collection of government or BBC information, recordings or documents relating to the war.

47,000 stories! I’ll declare an interest here: the site also contains “historical fact files on 144 key events”, about 40 of which I wrote. (I found the other day that 16 of them have also migrated to the main WWII page, where I guess they will hang on after the cull.) I hate seeing my work go offline, but that’s not the main thing. The main thing is that I know how much work and care went into each of my pieces; the thought of multiplying that by a factor of, well, 47,000, boggles me. And then to snuff all of that out for the sake of saving a few gigabytes of disk space – or, more realistically, for the sake of making the BBC look as if it’s not competing unfairly with its commercial rivals – beggars belief.

Perish the thought that something hugely worthwhile and massively popular, which ITV and Sky can’t do and don’t want to do, should get done for no other reason than that the BBC can do it and do it well. Perish the thought that public money should be spent on capturing irreplaceable memories and assembling them into “a digital archive which would provide a learning resource for future generations”. Perish the thought that a public service media organisation should actually provide a public service. Utter, wanton vandalism.

A massive over-representation of the White majority, together with a really glaring under-representation of British Asian and especially Black students, who are being rejected literally nine times out of ten, whereas…

Hang on, wrong figures. That first column is the ethnic breakdown of the population of London (which is where David Lammy MP was born and has lived most of his life, not to mention the obvious point that it’s where he works). Here’s the UK:

Well, OK, Lammy has got something here, but it’s not quite as big an issue as it might look if you’re coming at it from an ethnically-mixed background (also known as a ‘city’). The UK population in 2001 was still 92% White – there are whole areas of the country where you just won’t see a brown face, or if you do you’ll go home and tell somebody. I won’t be surprised if the figure that comes out of the 2011 Census is a bit lower, but I’ll be amazed if it’s below 90%. So the fact that the Oxford student intake is 85% White is not, in itself, a problem, except insofar as it suggests that recruitment from Scotland, Wales and the North-East might need a bit of work.

All the same, it’s true that Black students are seriously under-represented; a factor of 2 isn’t as bad as a factor of 10, but it’s not good. But this seems to be a point specifically about Black students and not about non-Whites more generally. If racism on the part of Oxford admissions tutors is at the root of what’s going on here, either it’s specifically anti-Black racism or there are other factors outweighing racist attitudes towards other groups.

Or is the problem at the application stage? Here’s how applications look in comparison to UK population figures (bearing in mind that these are 2001 figures and hence almost certainly out of date). In 2009, there were approximately 185 Oxford applications for every 1,000,000 UK citizens. If the same figure is calculated for each ethnic group, you get the following:

Applications per million

Over/under

White

155

83.5%

Mixed

703

379.4%

Asian

353

190.7%

Black

192

103.8%

Chinese

918

495.2%

Other

364

196.6%

Relative to the size of their ethnic group within the population as a whole, White students are under-represented. Asians and the ‘Other’ group – which consists mainly of people who declined to state their ethnic group – are over-represented; Chinese and the ‘Mixed’ group are massively over-represented. Black students are right in the middle of the distribution, a fairly small population represented – relative to the total of applications – proportionately to its size.

Here are the admission figures again, this time side by side with the application figures:

Applications

Admissions

Success

Over/under

White

76.9%

84.9%

27.6%

110.0%

Mixed

4.4%

4.6%

26.5%

105.6%

Asian

7.6%

4.6%

15.3%

61.0%

Black

2.0%

1.0%

12.2%

48.6%

Chinese

2.1%

1.8%

21.6%

86.1%

N/K

6.3%

2.8%

11.1%

44.2%

The “over/under” figure gives the relative success of each group as compared with the overall success rate of 25.1%. And it’s an interesting figure. Relative to applications, White students are quite substantially over-represented, while every other group is under-represented, with the exception of the ‘Mixed’ group (the cynical explanation that they’re seen as ‘white enough’ suggests itself).

Here, finally, is what it looks like if you put it all together. (These are the same numbers I’ve been crunching so far. The ‘Over/under’ figure for applications is the ratio between the number of applicants per million in each group and the number of applicants per million UK residents. The ‘Over/under’ figure for admissions is the ratio between the success rate of applicants in each group and the overall success rate of applicants.)

% of population

% of applications

Over/under

% of admissions

Over/under

White

92.1%

76.9%

0.835

84.9%

1.103

Mixed

1.2%

4.4%

3.794

4.6%

1.057

Asian

4.0%

7.6%

1.907

4.6%

0.610

Black

2.0%

2.0%

1.038

1.0%

0.488

Chinese

0.4%

2.1%

4.952

1.8%

0.862

Other

0.4%

0.8%

1.966

0.3%

0.428

Every line tells a slightly different story. The Mixed ethnic group comes off best, with a massive over-representation in applications which is entrenched at the admissions stage; Chinese students are also over-represented, with a larger over-representation among applicants only slightly scaled back at the admission stage. A smaller over-representation over Asian students is almost entirely reversed by the rejection of 85% of applicants. The White group is significantly under-represented among applicants, although the admissions process partially compensates for this with a slight over-representation, relative to applications. Alone among all the major ethnic groups, Black students apply to Oxford at roughly the same rate as the population as a whole, neither over-represented among applicants (like most others) nor under-represented (like White students). However, the Black group suffers enormously at the admission stage, with a rejection rate of nearly 88%; this compares with 74.9% for all applicants and 72.4% for White students.

So what is going on? A large part of what’s going on seems to be that White schoolchildren aren’t getting the top grades in the numbers we’d expect – although this is still being compensated during admissions. Where Black Oxford applicants are concerned, it seems undeniable that something is going wrong somewhere in the admission process. The numbers of Asian – and to a lesser extent Chinese – applicants are cut down fairly significantly in the admissions process, but this is compensated by a massive over-representation of those groups among applicants. Black students get hit both ways: they’re not over-represented (although I would find it hard to label this as a fault, particularly given the performance of my own ethnic group), and they’re turned away at an even higher rate than Asian applicants. Oxford’s own investigation concludes that subject choice must bear some (most? all?) of the blame:

BME students apply disproportionately for the most oversubscribed courses. Oxford’s three most oversubscribed large (over 70 places) courses (Economics & Management, Medicine and Mathematics) account for 43% of all BME applicants and 44% of all Black applicants – compared to just 17% of all white applicants.

Well, maybe, but I can’t help feeling that this explanation stops where it ought to start. It’s hard to believe that subject choice is the only reason why Black students’ faces so consistently fail to fit; more to the point, the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ subject choices themselves are not entirely weightless and without a history. I passed this snippet on to my wife (we met at Cambridge). Apparently Black students aren’t being advised to choose the right subjects, I said, and that’s why not many of them get into Oxford. What, she said, they’re not applying to do Land Economy?

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Drink to the men who protect you and I!
Drink! Drink! Drain your glass! Raise your glass high!

I’ve lived through several Remembrance Days, you may not be surprised to learn, and for most of those I’ve refused to wear a poppy. (And it did feel – and continues to feel – like a refusal, not a free choice.) Initially this was because I felt I was being asked to endorse Britain’s role in the Falklands conflict and the Irish war: both the British Legion and the government seemed actively to encourage a blurring of the line between the dead in the World Wars and the very different Fallen of the 1980s, which I thought was pernicious. Still, for a few years in the relatively peaceful 1990s I did wear a poppy on November 11th, with the Second World War and more particularly the defeat of Fascism in mind. But for several years now we’ve been back in a period of imperialist war, and I prefer not to celebrate it. I do mourn the dead – including the British dead – but for me they’re dead in a cause that’s pointless at best, barbaric at worst; and you can’t get a poppy with “End this slaughter now” written around the outside.

The red poppy, as the white poppy-producing Peace Pledge Union points out, occupies something of a privileged position among emblems of charitable causes. If you’re a police officer or a TV presenter for the BBC, you’re not allowed to wear a wristband, coloured ribbon or any other kind of symbol that shows your support for a charitable or political cause, and especially not a white poppy, but red poppies, and red poppies alone, are fine.

There are two possible justifications for this that I can see: one is that the Royal British Legion’s Poppy Appeal is neutral in a way that other charitable causes aren’t; the other is that the Poppy Appeal is, out of all the charitable causes in the world, a uniquely commendable cause.

Neutral?

all charities are legally required to be politically neutral, but if you can’t wear an AIDS ribbon or a Livestrong wristband on the BBC then clearly that kind of neutrality isn’t sufficient. But the Royal British Legion clearly doesn’t meet this requirement; the Poppy Appeal is manifestly not even politically neutral; every year the RBL creates ‘Fields of Remembrance’ which are intended as a “tribute to the memory of ex-Service men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice to protect their country.” This year there will be one at Wootton Bassett, where the bodies of members of the armed forces killed in Afghanistan are brought. This implies that every British serviceman or woman killed in the line of duty, in every conflict the UK has been involved in between WWI and the present day, was a necessary price to pay to safeguard our national security. Regardless of whether you believe this to be true or not, it’s quite clearly not a politically neutral position.

And as for whether the Poppy Appeal is uniquely worthy of our support – well, why would it be?

I’m sure the justification most people would give, if asked, would be something about the fact that servicemen and women put themselves in the line of fire to make the rest of us safer

– but this brings us straight back to the assumption about “all conflicts which the UK has been involved in being justifiable on national security grounds”, which is awfully hard to demonstrate with regard to (say) Suez, or the Malayan insurgency (Britain was agin it, in quite a real and tangible way).

The logic is impressive, but I think Owen misses a couple of obvious counter-arguments – one which I’ve already touched on, and one which Will sums up:

Wearing a poppy is quite a unique thing. There aren’t many ways that the British are able to symbolise a positive relationship to nation without descending to nationalism, to recognise the honour of the military without veering into militarism. It also has a beautiful ambiguity. It may represent something very patriotic and proud, or a form of pacifism. It needn’t mourn the dead of any particular war or even any particular nation. It may even represent mourning for the horrors of the twentieth century more generally. It’s not irrelevant that most of those who have died in war over the last 100 years did not go into the military as a career, but were dragged into hellish territorial disputes. Some people might feel particularly moved by those conscripts, others won’t. These various ambiguities allow people to congregate symbolically without being defined symbolically.

The poppy is about “a positive relationship to nation” and “the honour of the military”. It celebrates membership of a nation state with armed forces, with all the ambiguities and differences of emphasis which that allows: for different people, the same symbol can commemorate an imperialist adventure carried out by professional soldiers and a continent-wide war to defeat Fascism waged by a mass army of conscripts. But these different forms of commemoration remain within the framework of the nation-state: my 1990s anti-Fascist poppies were, precisely, celebrating the role of the British Army in licking Hitler.

This is why it’s beside the point to point out that very few people actually believe that every British serviceman or woman killed in the line of duty, in every conflict the UK has been involved in between WWI and the present day, was a necessary price to pay to safeguard our national security – and that anyone putting forward this hyper-militarised view of the world would scarcely qualify as “politically neutral”. The implicit argument here is not that the nation-state is neutral with regard to politics, but that it’s prior to politics: the British state, and the armed forces which underwrite its monopoly of legitimate force, are the precondition of any kind of politics in Britain – and of any kind of public sphere. We are not saluting those who died for no good reason in Iraq or Afghanistan or the Falls Road, but the men who protect you and I. (What we are certainly not doing – and here I entirely agree with Will – is saying that we think being injured is bad and being killed is even worse: an even more pre-political appeal, and one which evacuates the actual poppy ritual of what little politics it still gives houseroom to.)

And it’s because the poppy is a salute to the armed forces – our armed forces – that (coming to my second argument) neither wearing a poppy nor refusing to wear one is a free choice, in the sense that it’s a free choice to wear or not to wear a pink “breast cancer” ribbon or a Help For Heroes wristband. To say that the nation-state is prior to politics – to say that we enjoy British democracy and British liberties – is to say that we, as members of that nation-state, bear allegiance to the ultimate authorities of the state, and the armed forces which are both symbol and last-ditch embodiment of their power over us. (I lived in a Forces town as a child; if nothing else, it leaves you with an abiding respect for the armed forces’ ability to get the job done – whatever the job might be.) And if we bear allegiance, then, once in a while, respect should be paid. Declining to wear a poppy is opting out of allegiance to the state: it’s either an explicit protest or rather distastefully eccentric – after all, why wouldn’t you? (I see this in my children’s reaction to my failure to wear a poppy; I really should make my protest more explicit.) (I’ve never worn a white poppy, incidentally. The white poppy still has an air more of eccentricity about it than protest, perhaps because it says that the wearer wants to join in the ritual of commemoration and yet withdraw from it – like joining a march but insisting on making up your own slogans.)

The danger in all this is that sometimes the most useful thing we can do is not to pay respect to authority – and the time of war may be one of those times. In January this year I was in a pub when a loud and emotional argument broke out between a drunk and a squaddie who was about to ship back out to Afghanistan, where he’d recently seen his best friend killed. He was holding his drink quite well, but he was obviously quite well gone himself. The argument consisted mainly of the squaddie taking exception to everything the drunk said, and trying to shut him up by the drunk man’s usual method of talking over him, very calmly, very loudly and at great length; the drunk responded with the even drunker man’s tactic of carrying on regardless, in the blithe confidence that if he went on talking for long enough everyone in the world would agree with him. It was a fun evening. (I wouldn’t have minded so much, but we were trying to have a singaround at the time.) Anyway, nothing the drunk said upset or offended the squaddie so much as his profession of support and sympathy – “We’re all behind you, mate, we want to get you out of there and get you home safe and sound.” Big mistake. They had a job to do, we were told, and they were going to get it done. Anyone who said different just didn’t understand. There was a job to do, the army had been sent out there to do it and they were going to stay there till the job was done. They had a job on hand, the job was going to get done and they were going to make sure it got done.

From within the armed forces, of course, this is very much how you’d expect the world to look: they’re an instrument of the state and they’re there to get the job done, provided the job involves either weaponry or boots on the ground. The danger of paying respect to our state and our armed forces is that we as citizens buy into this heads-down goal-oriented mindset: theirs not to reason why (why Iraq? why Malaya? why Ireland?), and ours neither. Support the troops, we’re urged – and we’re asked to support them in just the same dogged, unconditional way that they’re told to do their job. But that way, our sympathy for the poor bloody infantry leads us to echo their unquestioning support for the goals they’re asked to achieve – and that’s precisely what we as civilians shouldn’t be doing. They don’t have the luxury of asking whether they should be going where they’re sent, but we do – and we owe it to ourselves to use it.

So: because I don’t think the British nation-state is prior to the politics that matter, in a way that my working-class ancestry decidedly is; and because, while I mourn the loss of life in Britain’s current imperialist adventures, I can’t endorse them; and, above all, because there is a war on, and I believe this is precisely the moment when spaces for debate and dissent most need to be opened up: for all these reasons, I’m not wearing a poppy.

1:30 a.m.: David Blunkett calls the election for the Conservatives and calls on Labour to unite the opposition in resistance to the Conservative government, to blunt their attacks on working people and “above all, to avoid what happened in the 1980s in my city”.

David Blunkett was leader of Sheffield City Council from 1980 to 1987. Wikipedia:

The Conservative MP for Sheffield Hallam, Sir Irvine Patnick, coined the phrase “People’s Republic of South Yorkshire” to describe the left-wing politics of its local government; Sheffield was designated as a nuclear-free zone. Blunkett became known as the leader of one of the furthest left of the Labour councils, which was regularly denounced as “loony left” by the newspapers of the right. Blunkett was one of the faces of the protest over rate-capping in 1985 which saw several Labour councils refuse to set a budget in a protest against Government powers to restrain their spending. He built up support within the Labour Party during his time as the council’s leader during the 1980s and was elected to the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee.

We’d certainly better avoid that. What happened in your city in the 1980s was that you resisted, David. You fought back and led a fightback, and for a while you were a bit of a hero. Some of us like resisting and admire people who resist – and besides, resisting meant you could do a lot of people a lot of good. (I still remember getting a bus in Sheffield and having to root around for coppers; fares were about a fifth of the equivalent in Manchester, ranging from 3p all the way up to 13p for a journey from one side of the city to the other. Admittedly, 13p was 13p in those days – you could probably get a Mars bar for that money. And if you tell the young people today… Sorry, where was I?)

Blunkett’s rewrite of the 1980s prompts perhaps the most depressing thought on a very depressing night: that an incoming Conservative government which has cauterised its own historical memory and has no idea what it believes in (but knows who it hates) is going to face a Labour opposition with very similar characteristics. It looks as if we’re going to be stuck in Tony Blair’s cafeteria at the end of history for a bit longer.

As I spend days walking across the borough, I find the detritus of the old thriving public sector now shut and shuttered. Next to a big council estate I stumble across the large red-brick Castle Youth Club. It was built in Dickens’ time and bequeathed to the local council “to benefit the children of this area for perpetuity”. The Conservatives shut it down two years ago to sell it off. The deal fell through, so now it sits empty while the local kids hang around on the streets outside.
…
I realise I am peering into the reality of David Cameron’s “Big Society”. The council here told people that if they took away services like this, there would be volunteers; if the state withered away, people would start to provide the services for each other. But nobody … started a new youth club on their own time and with their own money. The state retreated and the service collapsed. It’s a rebranding trick. The Conservatives know that shutting down public services sounds cruel, while calling for volunteerism sounds kind – but the effect is exactly the same.

I too would like to ‘punish’ Labour for the GWOT/Iraq business. Brown may not have been enthusiastic about the whole business, but keeping quiet and wishing it would go away while signing off on every penny is of course nowhere near good enough. On the same grounds, I’d like to reward the Lib Dems (as well as liking their noises about Trident and ‘illegal’ immigrants, for example). … But retribution and reward are not top priorities at this point, even they could plausibly be seen as a necessary part of a system of long-term incentives. (The war has already had electoral consequences in prising Blair out, of course.) … The urgent imperative is to keep Cameron out.

The Conservatives have done nothing at all to suggest they have moved toward the centre in broadly economic terms – even with a rightward-bound centre. … The Conservatives have, even before getting in, the most hawkish about spending cuts, and flagrant in their ambitions for top-rung tax cuts like inheritance, for example. Their real intentions have to be guessed at, but they won’t have been understating their brutality. Even the line of verbiage they’ve chosen to fill the ominous silence is actively repellent. All this wittering about voluntarism is familiar enough stuff, now elevated from a weak debating point to a supposed philosophy: ‘other things equal, wouldn’t it be nice if everything were done voluntarily, out of, er, benevolence?’. Other things equal my arse. Tell it to Adam Smith’s baker. Making obligations and liabilities voluntary – repudiable – has only one purpose, as every instance of self-’regulation’ testifies.

I particularly like that last point. Other things equal my arse – Tories of all people should know that you don’t get owt for nowt. But the market doesn’t supply everything or everyone – it’s conspicuously bad at providing universal services, unlimited emergency services or services for people who can’t afford to pay, for instance. The history of public service provision since Joseph Chamberlain has been one of collectively-funded efforts to redress market failure. Turn off the funding and that ‘market’ – the market for home helps, youth clubs, women’s refuges, emergency accommodation – will fail in a heartbeat. And the Tories know that, those of them who are older than 18; they have to know that. The idea of sleek Tory politicians knowingly and heedlessly consigning poor people to lives of misery and fear is terribly old-fashioned and rather melodramatic, I know, but it seems like an awfully good fit.

If you’ve got a vote tomorrow, please use it to help prevent a Tory government. That will be an achievement worth having been part of.

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I probably shouldn’t go to National Trust houses. Visiting one this afternoon I was accosted by an attendant, who wanted me to know that the strip of linen in a glass case on the wall was a garter which had been worn by Charles I. As I walked away, I couldn’t resist giving a quick finger-across-neck gesture, although I felt childish immediately afterwards. At least I didn’t do it to her face.

Anyway, there was one genuinely interesting exhibit in among the rich people’s playthings and copies of Old Masters: an early-nineteenth-century broadside ballad dedicated to the theme that British people wanted “King, not Consul” – more specifically, George III and not Napoleon. It seemed that what was particularly objectionable about Napoleon wasn’t the fact that he was a foreign ruler – and thus could only come to power by defeating the British armed forces and overthrowing the British government – but his religious faith, or lack of it. Napoleon was as happy to negotiate (from a position of strength) with Muslims in Egypt as the Pope in Rome: at worst he was a Muslim himself, at best he was a slippery and untrustworthy atheist. From the second verse of the broadside:

No Corsican despot in Britain shall rule,
No avowed devotee of the Mussulman school

Reading these lines I was suddenly reminded of the tone of the Euston Manifesto:

We decline to make excuses for, to indulgently “understand”, reactionary regimes and movements for which democracy is a hated enemyWe reject the double standards … [of] finding lesser (though all too real) violations of human rights which are closer to home, or are the responsibility of certain disfavoured governments, more deplorable than other violations that are flagrantly worse.

Terrorism inspired by Islamist ideology is widespread today … like all terrorism, it is a menace that has to be fought, and not excused.

the reaction to the crimes of 9/11, the excuse-making for suicide-terrorism, the disgraceful alliances lately set up inside the “anti-war” movement with illiberal theocrats … Leftists who make common cause with, or excuses for, anti-democratic forces should be criticized in clear and forthright terms.

The difference between the Left that I identify with and the Euston signatories seems less a matter of policy than of perspective. I look at the British government and I see several things that alarm me deeply: for example, the Terrorism Acts (2006 and 2000), the Iraq invasion, control orders, ASBOs, the creeping privatisation of health and education, an excessively friendly relationship with Berlusconi’s Italy, a far too friendly relationship with Sharon’s Israel and a downright subservient relationship with Bush’s USA. The Euston signatories, apparently, look at our government and see a democracy – what’s more, a democracy that’s under threat from enemies of democracy. Which means that, before we get into the details of what a Left project might look like in current conditions, there are hard questions to be asked. One hard question in particular: which side are you on? Do you want to be ruled by a Corsican despot, or don’t you? You don’t? Well then, you’d better stop complaining, and support the only people who are in a position to protect you. God save the King!

Back in Euston (surely not the Head of Steam…) the point is not to support democracy as a principle but to oppose selected opponents of democracy – and support the nations which also oppose them. It’s a retreat from politics into patriotism, essentially, sketchily covered by gestures towards universalism. (Like all terrorism, it is a menace that has to be fought, for example. Unlike the drafters of the Terrorism Act 2000, the authors don’t pause to define terrorism, which is probably just as well: I’m not sure there is a definition which would make that statement valid.) As I wrote earlier, “Taking up the cudgels for one relatively undemocratic status quo against another is a mug’s game”; in practice it may be locally appropriate or even necessary, but it doesn’t follow that we should treat it as a political principle. Unfortunately, the drift from tactical accommodation to statement of principle seems hard to resist.

It is all very well to be ‘advanced’ or ‘enlightened’, to snigger at Colonel Blimp and proclaim your emancipation from all traditional loyalties, but a time comes when the sand of the desert is sodden red and what have I done for thee, England, my England?
– George Orwell, April 1940

It seems the time has come for Norm, Nick and friends. At least they’re in good company.

The problem, I reckon, is the very vague formulation of the concept of agency. Classic manifestos identify a historic force (class, nation, the free-born or whatever) and pledge allegiance to it. For ‘Euston’, the agency seems to be ‘actually existing’ pluralist democracies as projectors of state power and example. But there is no examination of why governments should be privileged over, say, national communities, market-orientated civil societies or class alliance configurations as carriers of the democratic ethos.

I think this is backwards: I don’t think the concept of agency is vague, or indeed that it isn’t the starting point of the exercise (in the classic manifesto style). What the Eustonistas have done is precisely to identify an actually-existing (ha) historic force and pledge allegiance to it, then dress the whole in statements of liberal principle. That’s why the end result reads so oddly (“straight-forward neo-cons do this kind of thing a lot more effectively”, as Marc says).

Mr Blair said the country had to understand why it mattered that “we see this through”. It was important, he told the BBC, “because what is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq is that the people of those countries want to leave behind terrorism and extremism, and they want to embrace democracy”.Asked earlier whether the government was worried by the 100th death of a British soldier in Iraq, Mr Blair’s spokesman replied: “I do not think we should do the terrorists’ job for them by in some way hyping this kind of incident”.

100 is just a number, it’s true, but it’s a number that suggests a pause for reflection, on those deaths and what caused them. That would still be true even if you ignored all the other deaths, and even if you were convinced that a hundred British soldiers had died in a good cause. Even then, those deaths and the loss they represent would deserve acknowledgment. As Chris argues, sunk (human) costs have their due. But:

I do not think we should do the terrorists’ job for them by in some way hyping this kind of incident

This is monstrous.

I think the key term here is ‘terrorist’. A terrorist is, essentially, a political opponent who attempts to influence you (a democratic government) through fear. Terrorists have, by definition, abandoned rational argument: there is nothing you can learn from a terrorist and nothing you can usefully say to a terrorist, except “No”. Terrorism cannot be engaged with, it can only be resisted. Moreover, since terrorists have no arguments to offer, it follows that any sympathy towards them – and any wavering from your firm opposition to them – can only be explained by confusion or fear. You can afford to disregard anything the terrorists say; if people believe the terrorists, that simply shows that the terrorists have frightened them into submission, or confused them with their lies:

After Amnesty International compared American treatment of Afghan and Iraqi prisoners to the Gulag, I heard the President say: ‘It’s an absurd allegation. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world. It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of, and the allegations by, people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble – that means not tell the truth.’

It follows that your duty is to downplay any information which might add to the confusion by encouraging people to believe the terrorists or sympathising with their cause. They’re bad (because they’re terrorists); you’re good (because you’re fighting terrorists); and the people you govern are weak and confused and liable to forget what the difference is, so you can’t afford to let in too many shades of grey when you’re talking to them.

Even if it means a British Prime Minister refusing to honour British war dead.

Like this:

You [meaning me – PJE] take a more generous view than I do … of the opinions, implied or explicit, of those many commentators who have been saying (and continue to say) that because Blair must have known that UK participation in the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be used by Muslim extremists to generate additional anger and resentment against Britain, and that this would increase the likelihood of a terrorist attack in Britain, therefore Blair has a share of responsibility for the London bombings. Attributing responsibility in this way has two unavoidable implications: (1) that Blair deserves a share of the blame for the bombings and (2) that the increased likelihood of a terrorist attack in Britain ought to have been a factor influencing Blair against his decision to join the Americans in invading Iraq, even if on other grounds he believed it right and necessary to do so.You come perilously close to adopting this view, it seems to me, when you write:

the Iraq invasion created new opportunities for terrorists, created anti-British feeling which was likely to make it easier to recruit new terrorists, and created disaffection among British Muslims which was likely to produce active or passive support for terrorists – and that all these consequences were probable, could have been predicted and should have been weighed in the balance when Blair & co were contemplating joining Bush’s invasion. To have overlooked predictable consequences like this in a good cause would be bad enough (pace Geras); when the cause in question is the Iraq war as we’ve known it, Blair’s responsibility is heavy.

Once you accept that the threat of terrorist attack in response to a specific act of policy is a factor legitimately to be taken into account in making decisions on that policy, you are handing over control of our foreign (and eventually our domestic) policy to terrorists. This is exactly comparable to yielding to the demands of a blackmailer. The only consequence of such surrender is that the demands of the terrorists (and of the blackmailer) will become yet more frequent and more exorbitant. In other words, the increased risk of terrorist attack in the UK should have been totally excluded from Blair’s calculations of the pros and cons of taking part in the Iraq war.

In response to Brian’s first point, I don’t think that Blair’s government can sensibly be blamed for the bombings, unless there’s an unusually long and obscure trail yet to be uncovered, leading from the Foreign Office back to the madrassas. What does fall to the government’s responsibility is protecting its citizens from arbitrary killings. The question is whether the government may bear a share of the blame for failure to protect us from the bombings – a failure which may include failure to avert the bombings altogether, by contributing to the development of conditions which made the bombings more likely. The second argument – that Blair would have been correct to leave the threat of terrorism out of his pre-Iraq calculations – is more substantial, but I have to say that I find it highly counter-intuitive. As Tony Hatfield said in comments here,

The State has an obligation to consider every effect flowing from its policy-especially its foreign policy and certainly a policy involving a declaration of war. That must include the effect of any “blowback” from terrorism. … If that is so, then there must be circumstances- the threat is so immediate, and disproportionate to the benefit you seek- that it tips the balance firmly against the policy.

Brian’s analogy with blackmail is suggestive, but I don’t see that it can entirely sustain his argument – after all, any concession to anyone may be interpreted as a sign of weakness and exploited accordingly. When one government makes demands of another, there is always the possibility that one of the two will end up paying Danegeld or conceding the Sudetenland; however, in practice these extreme cases can be disregarded, and demands can be considered on their merits (bearing in mind the foreseeable consequences of granting or refusing them). Certainly it would be absurd to say, as a matter of principle, that no government should change its policies based on demands made by another government. Should we exclude demands made by non-governmental actors? But that’s not right either – we would expect (and in some cases hope) that governments would be responsive to demands made by multi-national businesses, by the world’s major faiths, by trade union confederations, by charities and campaigning organisations.

There’s obviously something about terrorist organisations which makes it reasonable (from Brian’s perspective) for governments to refuse any demands outright and on principle: something which turns pressure into blackmail and recognition into capitulation. Intuition tells me that the difference is staring me in the face, in the word ‘terrorist’, but in this case I think intuition is wrong. The problem with terrorist groups, in other words, isn’t the fact that they back up their demands with arbitrary and random violence. Imagine an organisation which attempted to gain publicity for its demands by planting dummy bombs. At first the bombs would be taken for the real thing and there would be a certain amount of panic and alarm, even if nobody was actually injured by them. After a while, though, the ‘bombs’ are treated with contemptuous lack of interest, by police and public alike. At this point, has the group ceased to be terrorist – and should the government become willing to negotiate with it? Conversely, imagine a campaign for constitutional reform whose rallies, ignored by the government, grow larger and more unruly, to the point where violent clashes with the police are a predictable occurrence. The campaign’s activities have led directly to the wounding of police officers, in other words; does this mean that it has turned into a terrorist campaign, whose demands should be ignored on principle? In both cases, the reverse appears more likely.

It seems that the judgment of whether a terrorist organisation is terrorist – meaning that its demands should be rejected unconsidered – is independent of what it does. The key is, perhaps, provided by Brian’s analogy with hostage-taking. A terrorist group, we could say, is criminal by nature: in order to achieve its aims, it needs to undermine the state and attack the rule of law. Criminal actions carried out by a constitutional political group are an anomaly which only have a limited effect on our willingness to recognise or deal with them. By contrast, criminal actions carried out by a terrorist group reaffirm the criminal nature of the group and vindicate our refusal to recognise them.

The trouble with this line of argument is that it brings the aims of the group into play as well as its tactics: if terrorist groups are defined by their fundamental opposition to the state and the rule of law, we need to be sure that the groups we describe as terrorist are fundamentally opposed to the state and the rule of law, rather than using criminal tactics to promote demands which could in principle be granted by the state (and legitimated by the law). Hence, perhaps, Blair’s bizarre argument that what sets Al Qaida apart from the British Army is that “They don’t regret the loss of innocent, civilian life. They rejoice in it, that is their purpose.” (Let’s hope for Blair’s sake that Al Qaida never takes lessons in PR from the IRA, who were past masters in regret for the consequences of their actions (we deeply regret the loss of innocent life, caused by a conflict which will inevitably continue…).) I’m not going to go into the question of whether the aims of Al Qaida are non-negotiable in this sense, beyond recommending some cogent arguments for and against the proposition. I think it bears stressing that the ‘blackmail’ analogy rests on an assumption that terrorist groups are different in kind from other political actors, and – most importantly – that this difference derives primarily from their goals rather than their actions (however criminal – however vile, come to that – those actions may be).

But let’s say that, in the case of Al Qaida, we are dealing with a criminal conspiracy with no political aims which could possibly conceded. Even in that case, I don’t think it follows that principled policy-making should take no account of them. Consider a less controversial criminal conspiracy, the Mafia. The Mafia certainly has no demands which any responsible government would grant; formulating policy in order to benefit the Mafia would be reprehensible. However, according to the ‘blackmail’ logic, allowing the government’s opposition to the Mafia to influence policy – perhaps by favouring policies which limited the Mafia’s opportunities to penetrate British society – would itself represent a tacit recognition of the Mafia as a force to be reckoned with, and should therefore be rejected. The responsible course of action would be to take whatever actions the government believed would benefit Britain, leaving the Mafia – and the possibility that government action or inaction might favour the Mafia – out of consideration.

This argument is clearly fallacious. Whether or not the government’s decision is influenced by the existence of the Mafia, the Mafia continues to exist and to have significant effects on the government, both at the time the decision is taken and at the time it is implemented. There is no possible decision which does not have a relationship to the Mafia, in other words; the choice is whether that relationship is favourable or unfavourable. A decision which limits the opportunities available to organised crime (perhaps by putting a lower limit on the number of casinos to be licensed) is unfavourable; a decision which does not limit those opportunities is favourable, whether it does so actively or by default. As with the Mafia, so with Al Qaida: if the government did, in fact, deliberately ignore the possibility that the Iraq invasion would expand the opportunities open to terrorists, it can fairly be charged – on those grounds alone – with making this outcome more likely.

Brian also argues that there is a fundamental and important discrepancy between the (wholly unacceptable) tactics of the bombers and the (potentially legitimate) political causes with which they have been associated.

The other implication of much bien-pensant comment has been that we need to ‘understand‘ what drove the suicide bombers (successful or failed) to commit such dreadful acts and to accept that we (or the Blair government, or western society, or whatever) are all partially to blame for the policies and actions that drove the bombers to do what they did. This seems to me an utterly unacceptable proposition, too, for the reasons eloquently expressed by Brownie in the passage that I quoted. The idea that the pursuit of policies with which others violently disagree is partly responsible for acts of criminal madness committed, apparently, as an expression of that political disapproval, is nonsense, and we shouldn’t hesitate to say so. You write that

people aren’t born terrorists. People have to become terrorists – even that subset of people who are also fundamentalist Muslims and believers in a restored Caliphate. Obviously the terrorists are to blame for their actions, but for those people to have become terrorists something must have gone wrong – something more than being exposed to an ‘evil ideology’.

but it’s a far cry from that to the assertion that the whatever ‘must have gone wrong’ is something for which our own society, or government, or culture, or original sin, must be to blame.

My point here was that successful terrorist actions require a continuing supply of recruits – all the more so in the case of suicide bombings, obviously – and that each of these individuals must go through a whole series of events and influences before they become a terrorist. Pace Brian, I’d say that it would be absurd to assume – on the grounds that terrorists have carried out ‘acts of criminal madness’ – that nothing about “our own society, or government, or culture” played a part in the formation of those terrorists. That is not to say that we can necessarily identify what those contributions are or how significant they were – in absolute terms or in comparison to other influences. But to say that no one other than the terrorists themselves bears any responsibility for their actions, and that we cannot – and should not – address the grievances which motivate terrorist sympathisers, seems to me to set up an absolute separation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ which is highly unhelpful. Something did go wrong for the eight bombers we know about; as far as we know it went wrong right here in Britain, some time in the last few years. In the circumstances, it seems to me, the burden of proof lies with anyone maintaining that the Iraq invasion was not a factor.

Postscript: at Veritatis Splendor, enigmatic NederlanderVlaming D says it all more succinctly than I’ve been able to:

The pro-war people will argue that the jihadists will always find some excuse to launch another terrorist attack on us, regardless of what “root causes” we take away. They’re confusing two things. It’s true that you can’t make deals with or give in to the jihadists. You can’t take the “root causes” of their hatred or extremism away. They will always hate us, for it is our very existence, our “way of life,” that is the root cause of their hatred. Their ideology is so diagonally opposed to our own, that peaceful co-existence with these people is not possible. And indeed, we shouldn’t try to appease them or adopt a laissez-faire attitude towards them. The only strategy against these people is confrontation: not only do we need to prevent them from attacking us, we need to attack them. Again, this is a matter of police and intelligence forces.We can however tackle the “root causes” of Muslim support for these people. As I’ve argued above, a radical minority is nothing without the support of the mainstream. This jihadist “radical minority” will cease to exist (or cease to be consequential in any case) without fresh recruits to carry out its suicide missions and without the silent, or vocal, approval of ordinary Muslim communities. The war in Iraq is a good example, because this is where the opinions of ordinary Muslims and jihadists “overlap”: they both think it stinks to high heaven. By stressing how much they have in common, the jihadist can persuade the average Muslim.

Conversely, jihadists are not that successful in gathering real, practical support for their ultra-conservative interpretations of Islam, or for their utopian “Caliphate.” We naturally oppose these ideas too, but why be so bothered with them when we know they have no real basis of support within the Islamic community itself? Does anyone seriously believe Europe will one day be overrun by massive hordes of Muslim warriors bent on establishing the Caliphate?

The average Muslim in Europe doesn’t want to kill homosexuals, or prevent women from driving a car, or stop us from eating pork, or burn every copy of Harry Potter. If we are to prevent his radical counterpart from convincing him he should do all these things, our job is to convince him of the contrary (“battle for the hearts and minds,” anyone?), stress what is clearly unacceptable and what is open to civilized debate (this as opposed to shutting down the debate in its entirety with the fallacious mantra “opposing the war = supporting terrorism”), and finally, do more to promote alternatives. In doing so, you take away the ordinary Muslim’s every reason to believe the jihadist.

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My hopefully provocative question: since those who tend to oppose this legislation tend to draw a disanalogy with laws banning incitement to racial hatred by pointing to a distinction between what is chosen and what is unchosen, with race not being chosen and religion being chosen, does it matter whether sexual identity is chosen when considering laws against discrimination or incitement of hatred towards particular sexual identities?

Robert suggests an interesting way in to the ‘religious hatred’ question. But first, let’s talk about hurting people. Before I’m a libertarian, even before I’m a Marxist, I’m a humanist, at least in the sense that I believe that human beings – all human beings – are more worthy of preserving from harm than anything else. Of course, this isn’t an absolute rule; the test-case scenarios are legion (the death of one person vs. the loss of an entire species? what about an entire genus? what about the loss of an entire genus vs. the death of the last surviving member of a tribe?). Let’s just say that the prevention of harm to people is value #1 and work from there. It does at least differentiate my position from that of the Texas sheriff I once saw on TV; his words were, “I’ve seen plenty of people that deserved shooting, but I’ve never seen a wallet that deserved to be stolen.” I’m not planning to go to Texas. Personally, I’ve seen plenty of wealth that deserved to be redistributed (did I mention that I went to Cambridge?), but I’ve never seen anyone who, in my eyes, deserved to be shot.

What Robert’s post suggested to me was that the question of religious hatred is part of a broader set of trade-offs, between harm done to other people and our own sense of identity: not the (few) unchangeable facts of identity that we’re born with, but our personal frameworks of habit, compulsion, self-fulfilment – the things you do to feel OK, to feel like you’re you. If you get off on wearing an SS uniform in bed, it’s no business but yours and your partner’s. If you write long articles about the joys of wearing Nazi regalia in bed, I may feel that you’ve got the right to express your sexual identity, or I may feel that publicising this particular sexual identity is a bad idea. And if you tell me that what gets you through the night is driving around Jewish neighbourhoods in an open-topped car wearing a leather overcoat and a death’s head cap, I’m likely to tell you to stop it – the distress you’re causing to other people will matter more to me than your ability to get your kicks. This isn’t a public/private question (assuming for the moment that that distinction is meaningful); the question of harm can have the same gradations in an entirely ‘private’ context. Someone who gets off on inflicting pain, for example, may be fearlessly exploring the outer limits of sensuality; they may be a boring and creepy bully (who, nevertheless, has every right to be boring, creepy and domineering in bed, as long as they can find a willing partner); or they may be actively dangerous and in need of therapy and/or locking up. The distinguishing factor is whether they’re doing any harm to other people. We may not choose the framework through which we see the world, or how we’d like to act, but we can choose what we do with that framework and how we do act. The choice whether or not to cause harm to another person, above all, is always ours.

Having said that, it’s not always obvious whether or not what we are into is harmful. In both the S/M-based scenarios I’ve given, there’s one extreme where harm done clearly takes precedence and another extreme where it’s equally clear that nobody is being harmed. Then there’s an area in the middle where (to paraphrase Altered States) the right answer is that there is no right answer. Your critique of leather queen A may be equally applicable to his friends B to Z; it may be a valid but extreme response to diffuse trends in the leather-queen community; or you may just have happened to pick a leather queen who is also a twisted bastard. You aren’t going to know until you talk it through, without either assuming that a particular course of conduct is harmful nor ruling out the possibility. The point is to have the conversation – and, more broadly, to maintain the conditions in which that conversation can happen.

But there’s a complication. So far I’ve assumed that ‘critique’ and ‘harm’ are not only distinguishable but entirely different things: ‘harm’ is all about actions and bodies, ‘critique’ is about thoughts and brains. But brains do more than think, and bodies do more than act: between these two (more or less imaginary) extremes is the muddy terrain where people actually feel stuff. In particular, where they feel hatred – where they desire to harm (or at least severely demoralise) certain other people, or groups of people. Which is a problem. There may be some individuals who it’s entirely appropriate to loathe and despise, but it’s rarely appropriate to view an entire social group with unalloyed, non-negotiable hatred. But, of course, prejudice of this kind does exist; feeling prejudice seems to come fairly naturally to most of us, followed closely by finding justifications for prejudice. And, where justifying prejudice is concerned, there’s no absolute distinction between a mindset based on a set of reasoned arguments and one built on unquestioned beliefs and habits: either one can be used to express and justify hatred. What’s worse, both can be used to portray the hated enemy in ways which will evoke hatred among other people – even people who don’t subscribe to those beliefs or arguments.

This, it seems to me, is very much the area in which the proposed new law on incitement to religious hatred is working. Whatever criticisms we might have of particular religious beliefs (advocates of the new law argue) we should recognise that there is such a thing as prejudice against a group defined by its religion, and that this is no more defensible than racial prejudice. Fears that the new law will have a chilling effect on criticism of religion are misplaced, we’re told; the law will only kick in at the point where critique stops and hate begins. We don’t condone racial hatred, and few people now object to the criminalisation of incitement to racial hatred (which dates from 1976); why should religious hatred be treated differently?

There are two problems with this argument. Firstly, as we have seen, the idea that hatred can be cleanly divided from critique is illusory. If I believe that a defined group of people regularly do something to which I strongly object, I’m not going to feel kindly towards that group. The question is whether this is hatred arising from a reasonable belief, or a prejudiced belief arising from hatred. In the case of racial prejudice, it’s generally not a tough call, for the simple reason that ‘race’ doesn’t govern behaviour. Where religion is concerned, the question is more difficult. Anyone who hates Muslim men on the grounds that they all require their wives to cover their faces is clearly prejudiced (‘Islamophobic‘, even). But if I said I hated those Muslim men who do require their wives to cover their faces (basing this policy on their reading of Surah 24:31), would I be expressing illegitimate prejudice against Muslims or a valid critique of sexism? It’s arguable both ways; I think it’s a conversation that should be held, and held out of the shadow of the criminal law.

Instead of opening up the question of what can and can’t be said about religious and cultural practices, the proposed law would shut it down, giving legal definition to the cut-off point where criticism (legal) becomes hatred (illegal). Since that borderline is essentially imaginary, in practice the law would be liable to bite off either too much (chilling legitimate debate) or too little (leaving genuine incitement to hatred unpunished). The former outcome seems much more likely than the latter. It can be argued that the 1976 legislation has itself had a chilling effect on discussion of race: the legislation only criminalises ‘threatening, abusive or insulting’ statements which are also likely to stir up racial hatred, but it has tended to make it difficult to make any general statement about ‘race’. On balance, this is probably no great loss. By contrast, the new law attacks an area where debate is widely seen to be both legitimate and useful; what’s worse, it doesn’t include that saving stipulation that the language used should be ‘threatening, abusive or insulting’. If somebody says that what you’ve said or written is liable to stir up religious hatred, the law says they’ve got a valid complaint, more or less by definition. (But (we’re told) we needn’t worry, as the Director of Public Prosecutions won’t bring prosecutions most of the time. We’re being asked to give the state new powers which could be abused, in other words, and trust that they won’t abuse them. Why don’t they just drop the big one and pass an Enabling Act?)

There’s another problem. Saying that rational arguments can support prejudice doesn’t mean that unquestioned convictions can’t: religious beliefs may themselves articulate and buttress hatred. The way I feel about the ‘conservative’ Muslim husband who insists on his wife covering her face is very much the way that I feel about the sadist who insists on spanking his partner with a table-tennis bat. Both are constraining someone else’s behaviour; both are doing something which seems unarguably right to them; both are reproducing broader patterns of gender-based subordination, in the form of a culturally-specific practice. And, crucially, in both cases this practice may articulate and support a personal hatred of women, or it may sit alongside feelings of genuine respect. It would be absurd – and grossly insulting – to assume that full-face veiling invariably reflects personal feelings of misogyny. But it would be equally absurd to ignore the degree of ‘fit’ between the injunction for women to be veiled and broader misogynistic social structures, and to assume that contemporary veiling is never associated with misogyny. The conversation needs to take place, out of the shadow of the criminal law.

Instead, the proposed law would tend to protect prejudice, as long as it was expressed in the language of religion. There are Christian ministers – to look no further afield – who express themselves in the most vitriolic terms on the subject of gays, or Jews, or members of other Christian denominations. Anyone denouncing this kind of purportedly religious hate-mongering would need to tread carefully: using the wrong kind of language about the minister and his flock could itself be classed as incitement to religious hatred. (We’re assured that this wouldn’t happen, of course, but that’s almost beside the point. We could expect to see prosecutions – or rather, we would expect to see prosecutions, and most of us would moderate our language accordingly. Is it getting chilly in here?)

Prejudice exists; hatred against any number of groups exists, religious groups included. (To bring sex in one last time, prejudice is a bit like pornography: if you can identify a group, you can be sure that somebody somewhere is prejudiced against it.) Prejudice against religious groups is a genuine problem; the rationalist argument that all beliefs should be equally open to criticism is valid but irrelevant, given that rational arguments can buttress and articulate prejudice just as well as unexamined systems of belief. Unfortunately, the proposed law attacks only one half of this pairing, giving its blessing to the other – and, for anyone who believes in rational debate, the law has picked the wrong side to protect.

But it’ll help Labour get back some of the votes they lost over Iraq, and I guess that’s the main thing. Make Secularism History!

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I don’t think the word ‘blog’ is really a contraction of ‘web log’. I think the ‘b’ stands for ‘back’.

The other day I worked out I had four blog posts planned: one on religion and hatred (half-written); one on attitudes to technology (complementing some of Chris‘s recent posts); one on ideas of ‘old’ and ‘new’ in politics, & how pervasive and misleading they are; and one, probably for the Sharpener, on immigration and social control. The trouble is, each one of these will probably take about an hour to write, & that’s on top of blog reading time (not to mention work, sleep, life etc). So it could take a while – especially since, when I sat down the other day to finish the ‘religious hatred’ post, I ended up writing a brief response to one of Alex‘s posts, which turned out not to be that brief after all and raised several issues I hadn’t thought through properly (thanks, Robert). And I’d really like to write something a bit more developed about Orwell in response to Justin…

Aaargh. Too much to think, too little time to think it in.

Part of the problem is that I was blogging like a mad thing at one stage, & don’t actually have the stamina to keep it going at that rate. I hope shortly to arrive at a revised definition of normal service, whereupon it will be resumed as soon as possible. In the mean time, I’ve reshuffled my blogroll, adding some good writers I’d missed and removing a bunch of blogs, including everyone else who posts at the Sharpener. I don’t really like blogrolls; as I wrote at my other blog,

the globally ‘popular’ blogs are quite popular enough already without their readers directing yet more traffic their way – and, for most of us, global ‘popularity’ is an irrelevant distraction. From which it follows that blogs don’t need blogrolls. If we blogroll everyone whose posts we respond to, the blogroll’s unnecessary. If, on the other hand, we blogroll everyone whose blogs we read – or, from the look of some blogrolls, every blogWeb site we’ve ever readheard of – the power law will kick in: links will inevitably tend to cluster around the ‘top’ five or ten or fifty blogs, the blogs Everybody Knows, the A List (ugh).

I’m keeping the blogroll here, but trimming it to focus on particularly good and overlooked writers. (If I’ve dropped yours, it was obviously because it was too well-known.)

Lady Thatcher told Reagan in a telephone call at the end of May 1982 that Britain could not contemplate a ceasefire before Argentina withdrew from the Falklands.According to Sir Lawrence, she asked Reagan: “How would the Americans react if Alaska were invaded and, as the invaders were being thrown out, there were calls for the Americans to withdraw?” She is said to have been “dismayed” by Reagan’s attitude and wanted him to know just how “upset” she was.

Washington pointed out that the US had secretly supplied Britain’s special forces with communications satellites and ammunition. But Lady Thatcher was adamant. “We have lost a lot of blood, and it’s the best blood,” she told Sir Nicholas Henderson, Britain’s ambassador to the US, on an open line.

It’s the best blood. I know I should be thinking of Enoch Powell here, but I keep coming up with Hilary Briss.

Senior civil servants, we salute you! For at least eight years – perhaps for as long as eleven – our government was clearly headed by a crazy person. The principled men and women of the Foreign Office stood between the world and Thatcher’s delusions of racial grandeur. Only now can we see just how well they played their part.

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Not so much a Googlism, more a Google.co.uk-ism (thanks to Mr Bartlett for the inspiration).

What could be more British than…

the quintessential Village Inn
a sweet cup of tea
Heinz Baked Beans
the zebra-crossing
fair play
a young builder sharing a fish and chips supper with his girlfriend
Thousands of people camped out in the mild evenings drinking tea
a nice cup of tea
roast beef with all the trimmings followed by apple pie
fish and chips
a gastro pub, situated in the heart of London’s East End
a garden, to remember the 67 British victims of September 11th
cheese and chutney sandwiches
The Times or The Sun
a jolly old picnic in a park
the Royal Family
“Here’s a picture of my bum”
Newcastle
marching peacefully through London
war, spies, betrayal
a breakfast of bacon and eggs
the Vulcan
A fillet of haddock in crispy batter, served with chips and peas (mushy if you prefer)
a Curry
the red, white and blue rosette of the British Motor Corporation
fish and chips, donkey rides, Ovaltine and Bingo
a cup of sweet tea
the old “working class hero” routine
Stoic, restrained, humorous, lousy teeth
real ale
a pint of beer
tea and scones
Huge bosoms, pert bottoms, and lots of innuendo
the sight of a cricket bat in the boot of a Jag
“Bloody Hell”
communing with God in a garden
a story about a Scotland Yard inspector investigating the murder of a star soccer player
inventing a sport, and then losing at it to every other nation for centuries afterwards
a long wheelbase Jaguar
the Henry Moore Statues ‘Double Oval’ and ‘Oval with Points’
Lawn Bowling and Afternoon Tea
a Mini
the Big Garden Birdwatch
muscular Islam
a good old motorway
a car that lends itself to having the Union Jack painted on its roof
total lack of enthusiasm
the National dish of England, Chicken Madras
hanging painted wooden or ceramic ducks on the wall
the ultimate symbols of the monarchy, the Crown Jewels
Michael Caine
an Indian banquet
the traditional “cuppa”
“doughy and bland”
an Oxford Companion to JMW Turner
Ealing Studios
a symbol of Britannia carrying a shield that clearly shows the Union flag motif
to have your Mini painted in the red white and blue colours of the Union Flag
Roger Moore in a safari suit
to enjoy a cup of tea
a record of Rolf Harris’s “Two Little Boys”Goodbye to Berlin, Women in Love, The Heart of the Matter or A Passage to India
British Airways, Rover cars and Moss Bros
blue jeans and a tan pork pie hat
tea

Rather a lot of food and drink in there, wouldn’t you say? Fish and chips, real ale, and of course a nice cup of tea – can’t beat it. (Bill Bryson said that one of the things that first struck him about the British was our ability to get “genuinely excited at the prospect of a hot drink”. Well, yes and no, Bill. We get genuinely excited at the prospect of a nice cup of tea.)

Being the artsy-bloody-fartsy type, I was also reminded of T.S. Eliot, who wrote this about ‘culture’ in 1948:

It includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar.

As Raymond Williams noted ten years later, “This pleasant miscellany is evidently narrower in kind than the general description which precedes it. The ‘characteristic activities and interests’ would also include steelmaking, touring in motor-cars, mixed farming, the Stock Exchange, coalmining and London Transport.” (What could be more British than coalmining?) “Any list would be incomplete, but Eliot’s categories are sport, food and a little art – a characteristic observation of English leisure.” It’s a good argument, but fifty years on the folksonomic zeitgeist of Google tends to agree with Eliot: food, sport and a little art, plus cars, protest, a total lack of enthusiasm and Newcastle. Nice to see protest coming up as part of the national character, mind you – better that than Henley.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Google’s view of English culture isn’t very different, although there’s less about cars and more about gardening. Oh, and buggery:

Gilbert and Sullivan
afternoon tea
fine fabrics and fibers [sic]
a fish and chip shop
consort music
Dr. Doolittle
to see THE QUEEN in all her royal gloriousness
an exhibition of original Flower Fairies watercolours
marching peacefully from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square
a country church with a tower
a laburnum in full flow
Sunday dinner with the vicar
A man dressed in medieval costume emblazoned with the cross of St.George
rain
Gardens and tea
Shakespeare
a lazy Sunday afternoon watching cricket on the village green
Steak and Kidney Pudding
drinking imported German lager and tucking into a plate of chicken and chips
beginning a meal with a chilled soup made with fresh strawberries
feeling too diffident to complain
Tea and scones overlooking Kensington Gardens
a fried breakfast
buggery and croquet
Curry houses
a Peter Noone song with a corny, contrived introduction
a May Day Bank Holiday Brass Band Concert
a pink rose
Terence Stamp
good old-fashioned boarding-school style buggery
poking fun at Americans

Poking fun at Americans? Wouldn’t dream of it. Purely by way of contrast with the previous two lists, here’s what Google thinks is typically American:

the gold rush
a Beer run
apple pie
baseball and apple pie
a can of Campbell’s soup
a marketplace
blue jeans
buying the best
standing up and saying “no, not in my name you don’t”
an African-music concert in an Irish/Italian neighborhood
migrating to a thinly-settled area to experiment with liberty
blatantly trying to get money out of a tragedy
blowing stuff up
the idea of a second chance, a fresh start, Act Two
a barbeque
doing our best to abide by the law
choice
an afternoon at a Braves game
the automobile
the dollar bill itself
the lawsuit
kidsEasy Rider
money
the eternal optimism that we can always improve our lot
the saying “you can’t stop progress.”
a trial by media
a composer grounded in Hollywood, but who has belatedly rediscovered his concert music identity
a tailgating party at a football game
equating second place with failure
Michael Moore
small-town citizens coming together to solve problems by consensus
a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air
a vote
an Oreo
baseball
Columbus Day
Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life
mud wrestling
standing up for the Constitution
reaping just rewards for your own labor
a history textbook that decides, halfway through, to be a detective novel instead
betting $1 million on the flop of a single card
corn growing on an Iowa farm
a hotly contested college football game between division rivals
the right to choose for oneself
the American Red Cross
Little League
watching commercials
pizza
baseball, hot dogs, and the Fourth of July
a fun-filled day at the park
suing the bastards
giving people a second chance
protesting and exercising our rights
raping the expressive and unique nature of a foreign culture for material gain
the socialist goals of social justice, equality of opportunity, economic security, and peace
Guns and money
fair play
pro-choice
baseball, hot dogs, and the Democratic Party
the flag
french-fries and hamburgers
democracy
pie